The typewriter on the left is a Remington built
specially for the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The
machine on the right is (supposedly) MT's first typewriter,
also an early Remington. In the autobiographical
dictations, MT boasted that "I was the first person in the
world that ever had a telephone in his house" and that "I
was the first person in the world to apply the
typemachine to literature." He started typing
occasional letters on the machine in 1874, and by all
accounts was the first author ever to have a manuscript
typed. In his autobiographical dictations he remembered it
as the manuscript of Tom Sawyer (1874), but
according to typewriter historian Darryl Rehr, the book was
Life on the Mississippi (1882), and the machine was
a Remington No. 2.

When in 1905 an installment of his autobiography
mentioning his experience with a typewriter appeared in
The North American Review, Remington quickly seized
the opportunity to use his remarks as a plug for their
machine. The ad below appeared in Harper's.